Open your heart, quiet your mind, renew your spirit

Cantor Lisa Levine is a worship artist, songwriter, ritual artist, recording artist, concert artist and yoga prayer facilitator. She has been building bridges between people of all faith traditions for more than 30 years. Lisa works with youth choirs, teen choirs, adult choirs and bands to create a unique and spiritual weekend of music, movement, chant, meditation and healing.

Jospel Jam - CD

Jospel Jam features some new melodies, old texts and remixes of classic hits. Jewish Gospel is the theme and these prayers and anthems will give you plenty to use for your choirs, Thanksgiving and Interfaith gatherings, church services and synagogue prayer whenever you wish to bridge the divide between faiths and cultures.

Lisa is often featured in Press for her thoughtful articles

Read a few samples of her writings and click below to see the full articles

The story of the Jews of Cuba is all at once tragic and triumphant. The Jewish population before the Cuban Revolution in 1959 was 15,000. Jewish merchant communities came to the island from all over the world to find their fortunes in tobacco, rum, textiles, and sugar cane. They built magnificent synagogues: Beit Shalom, the Patronato Jewish Community Center, The Sephardic Synagogue, and Beit YaAkov, the Orthodox Synagogue, which houses a beautiful upstairs museum sanctuary.

There are a lot of things we might disagree on when discussing the land of Israel.

Politically, socially and from a human rights perspective I don’t always agree with what’s going on in the government. I always tend to rely on my relationships with family and friends who live in Israel, delighting in what’s happening in their lives and supporting them in every way possible. Our homeland is a complicated and diverse place filled with wonderful sights, food, music, and culture and I’ll always be grateful for the strong foundation I have been gifted with my time there. Without my connection to Israel and her people I would not have two of the greatest blessings in my life: career and faith. I grew up in the southern San Juaquin Valley of Bakersfield, California which is an agricultural mecca and the center of the food basket of America. I loved gardening and backpacking and singing and playing guitar. My parents were founders of the Reform congregation there and I got my spark for music and faith from my teacher at camp, the late, great, Debbie Friedman. When I was 16 years old my parents sent me to Israel on the Kibbutz Aliyah summer work program for eight weeks. I lived on Kibbutz Enat near Petach Tikva. I worked weeding cotton fields, cleaning the kitchen, and traveling around the country.

That trip changed my life.

I fell in love with the land, culture, food, and music of Israel and made lifelong friends that summer. While I didn’t know Hebrew, my guitar did all the talking and I loved learning and sharing the Israeli and Yiddish folks songs I learned on the Kibbutz and busking folk music in the streets of Jerusalem. After that summer I made regular trips to Israel to visit my family and friends and decided to spend my junior year abroad studying at Hebrew University and the Ruben Academy of Music. My decision to study in Israel was largely motivated by my goal to apply to the Hebrew Union College—School of Sacred Music in New York City and I had to improve my Hebrew proficiency in order to do that.